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Jailhouse Witnesses

People who write about jailhouse witnesses say they "taint" the jury with suggestions and ideas, even if they are obviously lying, or known to be paid, or whatever. But if you ever sat in a trial with jailhouse witnesses, you would see it is sincerely 100 times worse than that.

For the prosecution to try to prove what happened, they have to spend 5 days with 10 witnesses such as fingerprint experts and video technicians, and 100 pieces of evidence. A jailhouse witness can tell a whole story of a crime, with every detail, in a single breath.

To disprove what the jailhouse witness said, the defense has to spend money on experts, and deposition transcripts. They need a witness and a few pieces of evidence for every detail they can disprove, spread across several days, The jury can't absorb it like that, all spread out and broken up by a bunch of rules and lunch breaks and court procedures. They can only absorb it the way only the jailhouse witness tells it.

Plus, the jailhouse witness is a colorful character, with a unique background. So it is the only part of the trial that half the jurors even wake up for.

There are crazy perverted rules governing almost every type of evidence. A jailhouse witness claimed my friend ransacked an apartment to steal things. The judge wouldn't let the defense show drugs that were in the apartment that nobody stole. Case law won't let you say what the jailhouse witness was convicted of, or anything about the type of person they are, other than the number of felonies and misdemeanor crimes of dishonesty, and that they were offered a benefit. If the jailhouse witness was charged with the exact same crime, and instead tells the exact story of her own crime, you are not allowed to point that out.

Any witness or evidence that might *confuse* the jury is blocked. Hearsay is blocked. But the jailhouse witness can go up and tell a crazy story that contradicts every piece of physical evidence! The jailhouse witness can say anything about anything, including the defendant, so long as she claims the defendant confessed to it. Those are the rules of evidence produced by case law.

The jury is under the false impression there is some penalty or consequence for lying. Real life is not TV, people commit perjury in trials every day and there is no consequence. For jailhouse witnesses, there is a reward for perjury.

Worse than not telling the jury things, is what jurors assume because you don't tell them otherwise. Jurors don't know the rules of evidence are stopping you from showing them and telling them things about the jailhouse witness that they assume you would tell them. The rules of evidence give special favor to jailhouse witnesses over every other type of evidence.

The jailhouse witness has secondary effects. Suppose the jailhouse witness says "Everything I tell you is a lie. The defendant killed the victim with a knife." Now the prosecution is allowed to show the jury knives all day, knives found in another county three days earlier with jello on them. Even if there is no other evidence of a knife or knife injury. And the defense is no longer allowed to give the jury an instruction to use caution in a circumstantial case. Because it is no longer a circumstantial case if the jailhouse witness claims there is a confession.

Finally, the judge tries to offer the jurors a cautionary instruction about jailhouse witnesses. Despite what judges may imagine about their own beauty, jurors don't listen to instructions! They are coddled and live like dolphins! They are just a mob of idiots. The jury instructions contain more hard reading than they have all done, combined, in the last 10 years.

Nobody who was just dragged off the street gives a fuck what the judge says or even remembers. They just wanted to get out of having to listen to their regular boss for a day. They sure as hell did not report for jury duty because they wanted to work, or to listen to a bitchy white girl in a robe. The majority of case law and rules of evidence are based on the assumption that jurors can't weigh information rationally. They don't even know which way is up, they just remember that one story that somebody told them clearly.

That is why the prosecution used a jailhouse witness whose story of the crime contradicted every other witness and piece of physical evidence in the case. And my friend got life without parole.

You can read here how violent carjacker Kaylee Simmons got out of prison for claiming Mandi Jackson confessed to something that contradicts every other witness and piece of evidence:

Kaylee Simmons

One of the biggest lies is that cheezy car salesmen like State Attorney Phil Archer are actually solving violent crime like this!